Explore and open up about what love means to each of you and what makes you happy. Photo/FILE
By FELISTA WANGARI
Posted Saturday, July 23 2011 at 00:00
Posted Saturday, July 23 2011 at 00:00
Whenever women talk about Kenyan men, the consensus seems to be that they have no clue about how to treat a woman.
Women often complain about the lack of romance in their lives: there rarely are fancy dinners, flowers, gifts for absolutely no reason, or even sweet words of affirmation.
Men, on the other hand, contend that they generally give love in forms different from the ways portrayed in romance films.
And from the accounts of the men interviewed for this story, it appears that women have not understood how Kenyan men love their women.
Sam Kairu, a clinical officer in Lugari, is so puzzled by the inability of women to read love when their men offer it that he is seeking answers from an online social network.
An update he posted hoping to find some answers reads: “What do women want a man to do for them so they can believe they are loved?”
Sam has been married for two years and says that there are more men who, like him, believe they are doing all they can to express love to the women in their lives but feel that their actions are overlooked.
Sam says he knows colleagues and friends who love their wives deeply, yet the women still doubt that love.
“I see the kind of sacrifices they make to afford their partners the best that life has to offer. But no matter what men do for their wives back home, the women fail to notice it. Instead they are bent on having doubts about the fidelity of their husbands,” he explains.
He too has made sacrifices, living in a single room and buying only bare necessities so that his wife and child can live in relative comfort back home in Thika.
“For me that is the ultimate expression of my love. What more can a woman want?” he asks.
Sam and his colleagues work miles away from home and he wonders whether the distance has anything to do with why the women in their lives do not notice their love.
Sam thinks that perhaps women would feel more loved if men spent every waking moment with them.
“I think women just want you to be with them all the time, because they keep calling to ask when you will be going home again three days after you go back to work,” he says.
Spending more than weekends at a time with his wife would require him to resign from his job.
Yet it is his job that enables him to express his love for his wife by providing for all her needs.
Many men believe that love is taking the role of sole provider squarely on their shoulders.
They say they work hard and sacrifice a lot to provide their wives and girlfriends with love in form of the comforts and pleasures of life.
However, they complain that on many occasions, the women do not seem to notice or appreciate that as an act of love.
They take it for granted that the man sacrifices his own pleasures to put food and other treats on the table, and assume he is doing it out of duty rather than love.
Joshua Kirui, 29, also says he has done all he could to love a woman, but on two occasions the beloved women did not appreciate his love.
Joshua, who works as a public relations officer in Nairobi, wonders if women can really tell when a man loves them.
He gives the example of his former live-in fiancée whom he showed love in every possible way.
“I took care of my fiancée, supporting her through college, giving her pocket money, and buying her personal effects, clothes and shoes. I was not selfish in bed either and made sure she was satisfied,” he says.
But he says his fiancée neither appreciated nor reciprocated his love.
She was a party animal who loved to go out late into the night and flirt with other men.
Joshua says that if she had listened to him when he told her to tone down her constant raving and quit flirting he would have felt that as an appreciation of his love.
Joshua’s experience with another woman was not any different. He started dating a second woman even before his fiancée left, but she too did not seem to perceive his love.
She was his colleague at work and was everything his fiancée was not – neat, and hardworking.
She also attended to tiny details for him in and out of work. His fiancée dimmed in comparison and before he could say “Aha,” he was having an affair.
He, in return, showered her with what he believed to be love.
“When she was pregnant with my son and having a hard time, I took care of her. I massaged her when her muscles were sore and took up the role of cooking and cleaning just to ease life for her,” he recalls.
“Moreover, even before the pregnancy I paid her bills, pampered her, provided for her needs best I could and helped her with chores. But she still accused me of not treating her right and I discovered she was seeing someone behind my back.”
Now Joshua says that trying to understand a woman is crazy.
He adds that some women do not recognise love when it is thrust on them.
“Not many men will go the extra mile to do things that are seen as women’s duties, but I did. I did not want to be harsh or violent with her, but she took my love as weakness,” he says.
Joshua thinks that his son’s mother could not make out his acts of love because she is an only girl in her family.
“She is used to a lot of pampering and attention. Try as I might, my little pampering was probably no match to what she was used to. Maybe that is why she did not recognise my love.”
Joshua’s new strategy is to take each relationship as a completely new experience.
“I thought loving a woman is about providing for her, taking her out for treats, giving her massages when she’s tired and buying her flowers. But I have learnt that women are different, and what may be love to one may not be understood to be love by another,” he says.
While men remain mostly traditional in their expression of love, women have nurtured ideas of love borrowed from various experiences they are exposed to.
Many men assume that because they are providing for a woman’s material needs, then she will notice that as love and appreciate it.
But the book The Five Languages of Love by Gary Chapman puts forth that each person has a specific way in which they like to be loved.
He refers to this as the primary language of love. Therefore, a person perceives love if it is regularly expressed in that way.
If the man is showing love in a way that his partner does not interpret as love, then she will not appreciate it. And he will feel that his love is taken for granted.
Sophie Otiende, a 26-year-old from Malindi, says that Kenyan men are mostly mired in tradition when it comes to love.
The result is that they may have been judged, perhaps too harshly, as unromantic.
“We say that they do not know how to treat a woman right, but I guess they show love in their own way. They are very protective of their women and defend them at every turn, and that is an act of love,” she remarks.
Sophie says that because of culture, Kenyan men imagine that providing for their families is the ultimate act of love.
She adds that a man may risk not spending quality time with his family to take up a second job to provide the best life for his family.
“I think that is how they show love, but we normally do not take it as love. We have misunderstood our men,” she says.
Jane Muli, 28, also feels that women may have been too harsh in judging Kenyan men.
She explains that women want to be lavished with fancy dinners and trips out of town by men whose idea of love and romance is learned from what their fathers and uncles did (or did not do) for their wives.
“Many of them did not see their fathers buying flowers or taking their mothers for special treats. They are reading from the same old script that says a man loves by providing for his woman,” she says of the gap in the perceptions of love.
“Women have aunties who teach them how to treat a man, but I do not think men get someone to sit them down and teach them the art of loving women. Maybe we should cut them some slack,” she says.
Nevertheless, Jane, a landscape developer in Nairobi, says that as much as they may not have had role models, men should not use that as an excuse not to learn.
At the end of the day women judge and perceive love from their men based on their own guidelines.
“A man should find out what love means to his girlfriend and wife, and do it. That way, she will feel his love and he will cease to feel as if his love is taken for granted,” she advises.
Contact the author at fwangari@ke.nationmedia.com
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